Along with the universal propagation of the Internet, the development of Internet communication technologies, and the rapid growth of communication infrastructures supporting the same, on-line space through the Internet has become another living realm for the modern day people.
On-line space is utilized in various ways and its representative example is purchasing products on-line. As the paradigm of life style and time utilization of modern day people are changing and developing in various ways, it is statistically known that the model for purchasing products on-line has not only grown as large as the traditional off-line market, but also is increasingly developing to cover more diverse and wider ranges.
Activities for purchasing products on-line tend to rapidly increase, and with the combination of innate on-line characteristics of being able to overcome the limitation on physical space such as the location and number of people, there have been proposed various forms of models for purchasing products on-line.
The most representative example is a lottery or a game that provides prizes, gift certificates, and coupons to a specific number of people participating in the lottery or game. This method is recognized positively for attracting interest and attention of the users since they are able to purchase expensive products with an amount of money functionally divided by the number of users.
Among the above methods, the method of being able to supply expensive products inexpensively in a lottery has advantages in that its procedure is relatively simple and products may be provided in various ways.
However, such a lottery, particularly an on-line lottery, has problems in fairness and objectivity since the lottery procedure is not clearly exposed to the outside and possibilities of the lottery result being rigged due to the manipulations of the insiders exist. In addition, the lottery procedure is too simple to attract the interest of users. For this reason, even though the lottery has been attempted and proposed as an on-line transaction method for a considerably long time, the lottery method is used as a one time event rather than as a regular transaction method.
Meanwhile, in the case of the transaction method using a game, it has advantages in that it may attract general users by means of the game itself; however, if the game is too complicated or difficult, customers are more likely to lose interest in the game.
A transaction method in which products are repeatedly or successively sold, the time invested in playing the game is a very important element, unlike a one-time purchase method. Therefore, regardless of the complexity or the level of difficulty, a league game may not be feasible and instead a tournament game maybe proposed to determine the final winner. With the premise that the above mentioned tournament type game has a lot of participants, an exuberant amount of games need to be played and so in reality, the utilization of tournament type game is low in number due to problems of instantaneity, repeated reproducibility and simple processing.
In other words, in order to allow numerous people to access and enjoy a game simultaneously and to operate an on-line transaction method for providing a product to a final winner or the like in a stable, repetitive and successive way so that it becomes one of the regular transaction methods, there exists the necessity of a method which has transaction safety elements such as fairness and objectivity, easy repeated reproducibility of games, attraction of interest, or the like.